In a lot of uh, fast food social media (Insta, Tiktok, Twitter) ‘toxic positivity’ is basically used anytime anyone commits a single offense of being too optimistic or endearing in a way that gives someone an instant knee jerk ‘ick’ or something, when they’re in a bad mood and just wanted someone to also be as angry or depressed as them, in the moment.
…People who do not have narcissistic personality disorder understand that there’s a bit more to it than that, namely long, established, continuous patterns in someone’s behavior which indicate that this person has an enormous amount of privilege, does not realize this, to the point that they become blind to serious concerns and problems, and then those problems become worse and worse because of the toxicly positive person’s nonsensical advice being detrimental and time wasting, or just vapid meaningless platitudes.
And then also, the privileged person often become overwhelmed when anyone lays out the basic facts of their reality compared to the privileged person, and then also they usually then get angry with the less privileged person for pointing this out, and now its your fault that you made me feel bad.
This can also happen at a large scale, where an entire organization or group acts like this.
Anyways, I don’t see why this has to be a matter of high privilege vs. low privilege. There’s definitely a correlation, but depressed rich people and happy poor people aren’t uncommon. Also, not all questions of positivity vs. negativity are in contexts that relate to privilege. It could be about the direction of a media series, for example, which is where I’ve heard it misused.
You absolutely could be toxicly positive from a position of basically 0 privilege, such as maybe an ascetic who thinks that the solution to the problems of poverty is to actually embrace or accept suffering, and not do anything to change it.
We do seem to agree though that toxic positivity is a persistent attitude and mindset, at least.
In a lot of uh, fast food social media (Insta, Tiktok, Twitter) ‘toxic positivity’ is basically used anytime anyone commits a single offense of being too optimistic or endearing in a way that gives someone an instant knee jerk ‘ick’ or something, when they’re in a bad mood and just wanted someone to also be as angry or depressed as them, in the moment.
…People who do not have narcissistic personality disorder understand that there’s a bit more to it than that, namely long, established, continuous patterns in someone’s behavior which indicate that this person has an enormous amount of privilege, does not realize this, to the point that they become blind to serious concerns and problems, and then those problems become worse and worse because of the toxicly positive person’s nonsensical advice being detrimental and time wasting, or just vapid meaningless platitudes.
And then also, the privileged person often become overwhelmed when anyone lays out the basic facts of their reality compared to the privileged person, and then also they usually then get angry with the less privileged person for pointing this out, and now its your fault that you made me feel bad.
This can also happen at a large scale, where an entire organization or group acts like this.
Fast food social media. Nice term there.
Anyways, I don’t see why this has to be a matter of high privilege vs. low privilege. There’s definitely a correlation, but depressed rich people and happy poor people aren’t uncommon. Also, not all questions of positivity vs. negativity are in contexts that relate to privilege. It could be about the direction of a media series, for example, which is where I’ve heard it misused.
You know, you are correct.
You absolutely could be toxicly positive from a position of basically 0 privilege, such as maybe an ascetic who thinks that the solution to the problems of poverty is to actually embrace or accept suffering, and not do anything to change it.
We do seem to agree though that toxic positivity is a persistent attitude and mindset, at least.